The panel of experts created by Congress to oversee the TARP program has found that the Treasury Department drastically overpaid for the stakes it took in financial institutions. The Wall Street Journal reports that “an analysis of 10 TARP transactions … suggests Treasury paid $254 billion for preferred stock and warrants that may be worth approximately $176 billion, a shortfall of $78 billion.” The panel’s examination, moreover,

suggests that the Treasury mightn’t have driven as hard a bargain as private investors. The report says the government’s investments and private transactions aren’t directly comparable, but that an analysis found that “unlike Treasury, private investors received securities with a fair market value as of the valuation dates of at least as much as they invested, and in some cases, worth substantially more.”

So Leviathan is absolutely dead-certain to waste our money because it does not weigh spending our money like we would weigh spending our money, yet we are going to keep going down this path.

The Journal further notes that Sen. Chris Dodd–who, of course, spent years forcing private lenders to overpay drastically for risky mortgage notes–is “eager to look into the apparent discrepancy.” Don’t you feel better now?

Understand: We are talking here only about the component of TARP wherein the political class uses the dollars it confiscates from us to buy ownership interests in (did someone say “to begin nationalizing”) big institutions. We are not talking about the part of TARP in which the political class spends our money to buy the so-called “toxic assets,” removing those from the banks’ ailing balance sheets. Nobody has a clue about what those are worth. That is, compared to valuing the toxic assets, the afore-described valuation of stakes in the insitutions themselves is the easy part. Yet, Treasury totally blew that one: apparently paying nearly fifty percent more than those stakes were actually worth.

As Sen. Coburn reminded us yesterday (see post from last night), after this porky-pig of a trillion-dollar “stimulus” is done, President Obama will be back next week asking for another half-trillion for the financial sector–on top of the trillions already spent on TARP and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac . . . to say nothing of the tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities from Fannie/Freddie loans, Social Security and Medicare. We have officially gone mad.